13 ms·

What Is the Best Way to Stop Internet Trolls?

28 points by rfreytag 11y ago

umeshunni 11y ago
Don't feed them?
- rfreytag 11y ago
  That means everyone has to get on board with your excellent advice. Not likely, sadly. The article hopes to offer an advance in troll detection technology based more on reason than hope. ;-)
- vkou 11y ago
  That doesn't work. They are perfectly happy to revel in the attention of their friends. http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2012/02/28/dont-feed-the-trolls-is-bad-science/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2012/02/28/dont-f...
  - mdip 11y ago
    This is what caused me to wonder if allowing trolls, but eliminating their conversation from everyone but other trolling users might be an option. Let them revel in the attention of their friends, but have that attention only serve to give them the illusion that they're affecting others while directly causing others to ignore them (and thus, prevent unintentional feeding). It'd be tricky to get right and probably not worth the energy in most places, but would be interesting to see and study the results.
    - CM30 11y ago
      So in other words, like a multi user version of Shadowbanning? It's an interesting idea (and I'm 100% sure it's been done before), but it doesn't really work out on any site with a significant audience. I mean, all you need is one of those trolls to access the site at work/school/wherever and notice their posts are being shown if they're not logged in, and then suspicions are raised. Too easy to bypass and figure out. It's like how people figured out Twitter's shadowbans, because people who followed them said off site that they weren't seeing their messages.
jessaustin 11y ago
TFA mentions Twitter at the beginning, but doesn't follow up at all with how terrible their interface is and has been for targeted users. The "solutions" discussed in TFA require the coordinated voluntary actions of users and site administrators, and are therefore impractical. We need instant technical solutions. It should be possible to "un-@" any other user, with no questions asked. That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening.
- fweespee_ch 11y ago
  > That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening. The problem with is then @alice controls whose tweets I can read if I want to follow her content. :/ Just because I want to hear what @alice has to say doesn't mean I want @alice to control whether I can talk to @bob. I think solid ignoring features is really the limit to this approach due to that fact. [e.g. @alice ignores @bob, @bob never shows up in her feed no matter what]
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    OK, split it down the middle. If you're already a @bob follower when you start following @alice or when @alice un-@s @bob, whichever happens later, then @alice's action has no effect on you. Even if @bob has been hidden from you by @alice's action, it only affects internal-to-twitter links like retweets. If you have a link directly to @bob or his tweet from Google or from an email, you can follow it successfully, and that action removes the hiding effect for you. These extra complications would probably be good for @alice, since it would make it much less obvious to bullies that she had taken this action in the first place. (Yes, if @bob has observant friends, they'll notice eventually, but that's probably OK.) I agree with you, the main point is that @alice doesn't have to smell @bob's shit anymore. The point isn't to nail it down exactly right here and now. The point is that this is a discussion that should have taken place many times at Twitter, and we should see some concrete results by now, rather than fluffy PR-focused fake-internal memos to the effect of, "ok guys now we gotta try hard!"
parennoob 11y ago
I have yet to see an article about Internet trolls and cyberbullying that addresses the nuances inherent in a couple of points: 1. Disagreement is inherent to a lot of discourse. Social networks are not research papers -- some of the disagreement is going to be accompanied with strong displays of emotion. Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie? If Anne tells Bob, "Bullshit, your arguments don't make any sense and you are just an arrogant cyberbro I DRINK MALE TEARS", is she cyberbullying him? Should her access to Twitter be cut off, or would voluntarily blocking her on the part of Bob address this problem in a sufficient manner? 2. How to balance prevention of trolling with limiting self-expression? The outside world is not a perfect place where everyone engages in reasoned discourse either. Given that pub-sub systems like Twitter are the equivalent of everyone shouting their opinions loudly in the same street, how much of the unreasonableness inherent in human discourse do we allow to penetrate these social networks to keep them essentially human in nature and not turn into a LinkedIn style list of platitudes? I wish the article went some ways towards addressing these. Instead it seems to focus on ad-hoc initiatives set up by a lot of people who (in my opinion) seem to not have any concrete ideas of what they are trying to accomplish. For example, one of the research papers linked [1] describes cyberbullying as including "...posting mean or hateful comments, aggressive captions or hashtags". In my opinion this is a rather extravagant definition of the term and should be examined more carefully and revised per the points above. -------- [1] "Detection of Cyberbullying Incidents on the Instagram Social Network" http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03909v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03909v1.pdf
- Zikes 11y ago
  > Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie? Gregory Alan Elliot is drawing that line right now in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott
- boopuyy1 11y ago
  I just thought it would be good to point out that you are creating a strawman. You've created an example that you acknowledge isn't cyber bullying, and use that to suggest that therefore cyber bullying can't exist in any form. It's a disingenuous argument at best.
throwaway21816 11y ago
Not being a cry baby. Just because someone called you fat/doesnt agree with you doesnt mean you need to cry about it on the internet all day. The internet is an aggressive place due to its indirect nature, when you put 'soft' people on it they will get upset. The perceived increase in trolling is just a result of more 'soft' people being on the internet.
- throwaway21816 11y ago
  Im being downvoted, oh no I better cry about it
  - dang 11y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines. This is not a legitimate use of throwaway accounts on HN.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
CPLX 11y ago
I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form or another since it was all green text on a black background, and I don't think things are any different now than they have ever been in any way that really matters. The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person. Though -- like a character in your favorite movie or TV show -- it is of course created by a real person, it is still a fictional character. With the exception of actual actions that come into the real world, such as fake reporting to the police, interfering with someone's ability to have a job, etc, the vast vast majority of online "trolling" is solved by ignoring it. Same as it ever was.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  Many internet forums are no longer community-organized or community-funded like they were in the early days of the internet. Many media companies spend money moderating internet forums because their users and/or advertisers have expectations. Automatically detecting or predicting bad behavior decreases the cost of running these forums, whose purpose is profit rather than dialog. It's not a change in the nature of trolling that makes moderation more necessary than it was in the past; rather, it's the monetization of forum-posting audiences.
- darkclarity 11y ago
  I suspect a lot of the problems with trolling is inexperienced users not realising that the Internet is the technology equivalent of the wild west. They sign up for services, post all their details and make the sort of off-hand comments that wouldn't be picked up in close circles, except they are using a global publishing platform (social media).
  - fixermark 11y ago
    The Internet continues to look less and less like the wild west, and as that trend continues (to torture the metaphor a bit), the expectation that users should go around with guns strapped to their hips will continue to diminish.
buckbova 11y ago
Remove all perceived anonymity. Of course that sense of anonymity is what makes the experience richer and safer. I'd rather just live with the trolls. Is it that bad?
- DanBC 11y ago
  People are happy to make idiotic comments under their real names linked to their real identity. See the Sikh who advertised Facebook ("What's this raghead terrorist doing on my wall?") or comments under any news article (especially Daily Fucking Mail ("Kill the immigrants")).
  - buckbova 11y ago
    They exist and are ultimately in the minority. Anonymous apps tend to bring out the worst in people, especially with groups like teenagers and cyberbullying.
- dominotw 11y ago
  Nice try NSA. Seems kind of insane that people are willing to dox themselves on the internet.
  - dguaraglia 11y ago
    If you read the OP comment carefully, you'll notice he actually is saying the opposite: he'd rather live with the trolls, than have to give up anonymity.
- mdip 11y ago
  I wish this were a silver bullet, and of course, nothing would completely be a silver bullet, but even in forums/comments that require the use of a "Real Name" (to the extent it can truly be enforced), it's clear that people are OK with trolling under their actual name. The perception of anonymity is important, yes, but the illusion that they're not attacking a "real person" seems to be enough to let people become detached enough to be examples of terrible human beings. And losing anonymity also reduces someone's willingness to talk openly (and civilly) about a topic that they may otherwise be unwilling to discuss (sexuality, medical issues, etc). Heck, I won't even talk directly about my political opinion after reading articles about how people with strong political views are willing to reject a candidate for hiring entirely because of them not aligning politically (not really a problem for me since I generally hate politics). This also lowers the number of available voices and it might reduce the ratio as it relates to trolls. In a sensitive topic do we lose more trolls this way or do we lose more civil conversation? I'm not sure. Elimination of anonymity helps, yes, but isn't appropriate for every kind of discussion and must be combined with other methods.
beeboop 11y ago
If you're so sensitive that your day is ruined or you feel uncomfortable by what a random, anonymous idiot says on the internet, you need to either A. Stay off the internet or B. Only participate in communities where you control who has the ability to post content you see (i.e. facebook). The world doesn't owe you a safe-space hugbox. Trying to censor people for being mean is just as shitty as trying to censor them for saying things you disagree with. I value the rights Americans have to be horrendous shitheads on the internet and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
- voidz 11y ago
  I know this one! The good answer is: A.
- apozem 11y ago
  This "toughen up" sentiment sounds nice in theory but it's absurd in practice. Listen to writer Mindy West's story on This American Life about confronting one of her worst trolls [1]. Her troll made a fake Twitter account in the name of her dead father just to mock her. That's grotesque. Not being online or in a community not full of jackasses (what you derisively call a "hugbox") isn't an option for West. She's a writer who has to be on the internet and engaged with social media to do her job. Before you say "Well if you can't handle that, get another job," think about that statement. You're normalizing people being jackasses and blaming their victims for trying to be regular people doing their jobs. You are literally saying, "It's your fault for being on the internet, what did you expect?" West is a good example of how ridiculous this mentality is. We should all be able to participate in online communities without the fear of being stalked or harassed. Frankly, if the mostly white, mostly male tech community was less so, they might actually understand that. This kind of victim-blaming is absurd. I understand a lot of people in tech are fond of free speech principles (and rightly so, they're important) and edgy South Park libertarianism, but this is not the right hill to die on. [1]: http://www.themarysue.com/this-american-life-trolls/ http://www.themarysue.com/this-american-life-trolls/
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    What options do well-intentioned people have to fight back? Doxxing the doxxers? Maybe someone will eventually form an online version of the Guardian Angels [1] to combat this issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels
vegancap 11y ago
Ignore them.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
coldcode 11y ago
A beer truck? Seriously everywhere you have free and open communication some people will be trolls. The only difference between today and say 2500 years ago is the speed of dissemination and little fear of being run through with a sword.
- mdip 11y ago
  The only difference between today and say 2500 years ago is the speed of dissemination and little fear of being run through with a sword. I think, though, that it's a pretty huge difference. The speed with which someone can crap all over a discussion is instantaneous and psychologically a lot easier due to not being "in person". Trolling in the form that it would have existed a couple of centuries ago[1] still exists today (without the sword, perhaps, but the threat of violence in retaliation to trolling still exists today -- we just have better technology and better enforcement). I would use Donald Trump as an example. He gets his share of trolling (and non-trolling protesting) at his in-person events, however, I'd hazard a guess that the amount of such activity during his entire campaign would be about as much as is seen in an hour on Reddit. [1] We don't have a lot of historical evidence that dates back 2500 years, so I'm assuming that was a typo or an embellishment used to make a point (or, perhaps, something I missed in my speed reading of the article).
mdip 11y ago
I've wondered about this for a while. There's no shortage of dicks[1] on the Internet. It's too easy to spout off and attack someone online in a way you'd never do "in person" and there's plenty of people who make a sport of it. For the former, there's not much that can be done, for the latter, I think there are a few solutions (variations of which I've seen tried). Personally, I think it starts first with community standards and moderation. Hacker News, Stack Overflow and such do a pretty good job already. You get a share of jerks here and there but by and large the community self-filters the tone[2] as much as the quality of the comments. When the inevitable trolls appears, one of the best approaches I've seen is to silence them without their knowing it. I wonder how often this practice is figured out and remediated by creating a new account. It'd be possible to extend this further by categorizing troll posts and selectively providing them to each other (as well as providing all replies) so that they think "it's working" and don't bother switching accounts, all the while hiding all of the trash from everyone else. Perhaps that's a lot of wasted energy but I'd be interested in hearing if something like that has been tried anywhere. [1] That word always seems to describe the behavior best, to me. I'll use "jerk" from now on. :) [2] I've always believed that you can say "someone/something is wrong on the internet!" without having to be a jerk about it and have seen many examples of such on Hacker News and the StackExchange family of sites. Those who cannot lack creativity and are, unfortunately, less likely to have their (possibly) valid arguments heard.
- ross-life 11y ago
  one of the best approaches I've seen is to silence them without their knowing it Shadowbanning does work well but requires (somewhat obviously) fair admins/moderators. Otherwise it becomes something like a censorship tool.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
There is no such thing as a troll. There is such a thing as people being presented with content that's irrelevant to their interests. I better way to semantically express what we need, as well as a recommendation system that goes with it, is what we lack today.
scrupulusalbion 11y ago
I always find it strange how people are seriously concerned with trolling. I understand that children, the emotionally immature, and the psychologically ill are actually harmed by trolling. However, those people are already at risk of being harmed by anything approaching verbal abuse. These are the people who have more important issues to deal with than trolling. These people are irrelevant in this context. The people who matter to trolls are those who can't take a joke, who are super serious all the time; they want to be mad about something. Trolls merely give those people what they want. Flame wars ensue. Purposeful trolls are social pranksters and are conscious of their trolling; these can be reasoned with and are thus not serious issues to fora. The actual trolls worth worrying about are those who troll yet know not their trollish behavior. These people begin arguments over trivialities and get called jerks/dicks/assholes. These people are much harder to reason with, because they will only listen when they are emotionally sober; bringing up their trolling just gets them deep into another argument. You can't stop trolls; they have to grow out of their own emotional immaturity. Thus, as the unconscious trolls are themselves a subset of those harmed by trolling, they can and do harm others without understanding what harm they cause.
arjie 11y ago
The article alludes to it, but there's some pretty neat work at Riot Games around improving player behavior. Here's a pretty good video:http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-.... It's half an hour long but has some fun results. When you have a player base as large as Riot does with League of Legends, some sorts of experiments become possible. Good fun.
CM30 11y ago
Moderation is the best way to stop them. If you've got actual people going through posts and content and removing the low quality stuff, you'll maintain a much more well ordered and useful community than you would a mostly 'uncensored' platform. Unfortunately, this has a few issues... 1. You need the manpower to actually check what's being posted on a regular basis. Or enough active members willing to help out that they'll do it for you on a voluntary basis as moderators. This is obviously easier for small sites like customer support forums and the average fan site. 2, You need to really, really limit bias as much as possible, so that you're booting out people or bots because of their behaviour rather than their political/social stances. This is what Twitter doesn't do at the moment, to the point being a 'progressive' troll is a good way to never get banned while being a conservative or having an unpopular opinion will get your account suspended for the smallest trangression. 3. A willingness to ban popular, rich or 'powerful' users as much as anyone else, if they break the rules. A good forum/community manager will just as easily kick out a troll with ten thousand posts as one with ten, but social media sites don't seem to have figured this out yet. So for a community manager or site owner, moderation is the best way to stop internet trolls (and every other type of troublemaker or nuisance as well). Making a user's post invisible to everyone but himself (shadowbanning or as vBulletin called it, Tachy goes to Coventry) and making their time on the site a nightmare due to fake errors (hell banning/miserable users) used to work. Note the word used to, since the internet is a lot more savvy about this sort of stuff and will usually figure out these systems pretty quickly now. As for how to avoid internet trolls as a user? Well, stay off large social sites with few rules (or in some cases, extremely badly enforced ones) and go to places where the people tend to be a bit nicer to each other due to a shared interest or two. Less Twitter, more forums. Stay fairly anonymous wherever possible. Seriously, trolls love knowing every detail about someone's offline existence and what annoys or upsets them. By giving less personal information, you force people to either REALLY dig for information to use or to attack your arguments rather than your background/appearance/personality. Don't engage in arguments with trolls/idiots. The more you make it seem to affect you, the more pleasure a troll will get from their actions. If you've ever watched The Simpsons, you probably remember the scenes where Bart prank calls Moe's Tavern, right? Or how often, Moe would basically scream back down the phone in anger afterwards? That's what a troll wants to see. They want people who are easy to annoy. So yeah. Moderated community platforms tend to be the best way to stop internet trolls, since they mean such users and comments are removed as quickly as possible.
javajosh 11y ago
Easy: introduce laws that require all communication to be consensual. We don't allow people to force food down your mouth, and we shouldn't allow people to force words into your brain either. What would this be like? Before seeing something, you'd be asked if you want to see "An advertisement for a home care product." Or "An angry personal attack" (Maybe with some indication of who it's against.) This solution allows everyone to say whatever they want, and adds the ability for everyone to not be exposed to what they don't want to be exposed to.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  >An advertisement for a home care product. How do you know I want to be exposed to a consent related question? Kinda like how asking certain questions about consent can be classified as harassment if you have already been told no, even if the actions of which consent was being requested for were never carried out.
  - javajosh 11y ago
    Sufficient pedantry can make any solution seem unworkable.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
In public we arrest those who break down civil society by smashing windows, beating people up or threating law-abiding citizens. On the internet, we dispute whether anything is actually going wrong. Or how to automatically solve it. At some point I think a wet team is the only solution.
- bcook 11y ago
  Wet team? (Are you referring to "wet-work", aka murder?)
chris_wot 11y ago
For all the good that Twitter does, it is farceorsecwhat social harm is done. I don't use Twitter and likely never will. It's a cesspool of discrimination and abuse. I hope it dies as a medium.
stegosaurus 11y ago
Journalists seem to make a habit of misunderstanding the term 'troll'. Trolling is a joke. Harassment is not. Joining a dungeon in World of Warcraft and wiping the group is trolling. Sending someone genuine sounding death threats on twitter isn't. There's a spectrum there somewhere, but more often than not it feels like we've lost another useful term to hyperbole.
- elthran 11y ago
  Always this. The BBC seems especially bad for calling being insulted or offended by something on the internet "Trolling"

28 points by rfreytag 11y ago

umeshunni 11y ago

Don't feed them?

rfreytag 11y ago
That means everyone has to get on board with your excellent advice. Not likely, sadly. The article hopes to offer an advance in troll detection technology based more on reason than hope. ;-)
vkou 11y ago
That doesn't work. They are perfectly happy to revel in the attention of their friends. http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2012/02/28/dont-feed-the-trolls-is-bad-science/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2012/02/28/dont-f...
- mdip 11y ago
  This is what caused me to wonder if allowing trolls, but eliminating their conversation from everyone but other trolling users might be an option. Let them revel in the attention of their friends, but have that attention only serve to give them the illusion that they're affecting others while directly causing others to ignore them (and thus, prevent unintentional feeding). It'd be tricky to get right and probably not worth the energy in most places, but would be interesting to see and study the results.
  - CM30 11y ago
    So in other words, like a multi user version of Shadowbanning? It's an interesting idea (and I'm 100% sure it's been done before), but it doesn't really work out on any site with a significant audience. I mean, all you need is one of those trolls to access the site at work/school/wherever and notice their posts are being shown if they're not logged in, and then suspicions are raised. Too easy to bypass and figure out. It's like how people figured out Twitter's shadowbans, because people who followed them said off site that they weren't seeing their messages.

jessaustin 11y ago

TFA mentions Twitter at the beginning, but doesn't follow up at all with how terrible their interface is and has been for targeted users. The "solutions" discussed in TFA require the coordinated voluntary actions of users and site administrators, and are therefore impractical. We need instant technical solutions. It should be possible to "un-@" any other user, with no questions asked. That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening.

fweespee_ch 11y ago
> That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening. The problem with is then @alice controls whose tweets I can read if I want to follow her content. :/ Just because I want to hear what @alice has to say doesn't mean I want @alice to control whether I can talk to @bob. I think solid ignoring features is really the limit to this approach due to that fact. [e.g. @alice ignores @bob, @bob never shows up in her feed no matter what]
- jessaustin 11y ago
  OK, split it down the middle. If you're already a @bob follower when you start following @alice or when @alice un-@s @bob, whichever happens later, then @alice's action has no effect on you. Even if @bob has been hidden from you by @alice's action, it only affects internal-to-twitter links like retweets. If you have a link directly to @bob or his tweet from Google or from an email, you can follow it successfully, and that action removes the hiding effect for you. These extra complications would probably be good for @alice, since it would make it much less obvious to bullies that she had taken this action in the first place. (Yes, if @bob has observant friends, they'll notice eventually, but that's probably OK.) I agree with you, the main point is that @alice doesn't have to smell @bob's shit anymore. The point isn't to nail it down exactly right here and now. The point is that this is a discussion that should have taken place many times at Twitter, and we should see some concrete results by now, rather than fluffy PR-focused fake-internal memos to the effect of, "ok guys now we gotta try hard!"

parennoob 11y ago

I have yet to see an article about Internet trolls and cyberbullying that addresses the nuances inherent in a couple of points: 1. Disagreement is inherent to a lot of discourse. Social networks are not research papers -- some of the disagreement is going to be accompanied with strong displays of emotion. Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie? If Anne tells Bob, "Bullshit, your arguments don't make any sense and you are just an arrogant cyberbro I DRINK MALE TEARS", is she cyberbullying him? Should her access to Twitter be cut off, or would voluntarily blocking her on the part of Bob address this problem in a sufficient manner? 2. How to balance prevention of trolling with limiting self-expression? The outside world is not a perfect place where everyone engages in reasoned discourse either. Given that pub-sub systems like Twitter are the equivalent of everyone shouting their opinions loudly in the same street, how much of the unreasonableness inherent in human discourse do we allow to penetrate these social networks to keep them essentially human in nature and not turn into a LinkedIn style list of platitudes? I wish the article went some ways towards addressing these. Instead it seems to focus on ad-hoc initiatives set up by a lot of people who (in my opinion) seem to not have any concrete ideas of what they are trying to accomplish. For example, one of the research papers linked [1] describes cyberbullying as including "...posting mean or hateful comments, aggressive captions or hashtags". In my opinion this is a rather extravagant definition of the term and should be examined more carefully and revised per the points above. -------- [1] "Detection of Cyberbullying Incidents on the Instagram Social Network" http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03909v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03909v1.pdf

Zikes 11y ago
> Where does the line between strong disagreement and bullying lie? Gregory Alan Elliot is drawing that line right now in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott
boopuyy1 11y ago
I just thought it would be good to point out that you are creating a strawman. You've created an example that you acknowledge isn't cyber bullying, and use that to suggest that therefore cyber bullying can't exist in any form. It's a disingenuous argument at best.

throwaway21816 11y ago

Not being a cry baby. Just because someone called you fat/doesnt agree with you doesnt mean you need to cry about it on the internet all day. The internet is an aggressive place due to its indirect nature, when you put 'soft' people on it they will get upset. The perceived increase in trolling is just a result of more 'soft' people being on the internet.

throwaway21816 11y ago
Im being downvoted, oh no I better cry about it
- dang 11y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines. This is not a legitimate use of throwaway accounts on HN.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

CPLX 11y ago

I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form or another since it was all green text on a black background, and I don't think things are any different now than they have ever been in any way that really matters. The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person. Though -- like a character in your favorite movie or TV show -- it is of course created by a real person, it is still a fictional character. With the exception of actual actions that come into the real world, such as fake reporting to the police, interfering with someone's ability to have a job, etc, the vast vast majority of online "trolling" is solved by ignoring it. Same as it ever was.

nmrm2 11y ago
Many internet forums are no longer community-organized or community-funded like they were in the early days of the internet. Many media companies spend money moderating internet forums because their users and/or advertisers have expectations. Automatically detecting or predicting bad behavior decreases the cost of running these forums, whose purpose is profit rather than dialog. It's not a change in the nature of trolling that makes moderation more necessary than it was in the past; rather, it's the monetization of forum-posting audiences.
darkclarity 11y ago
I suspect a lot of the problems with trolling is inexperienced users not realising that the Internet is the technology equivalent of the wild west. They sign up for services, post all their details and make the sort of off-hand comments that wouldn't be picked up in close circles, except they are using a global publishing platform (social media).
- fixermark 11y ago
  The Internet continues to look less and less like the wild west, and as that trend continues (to torture the metaphor a bit), the expectation that users should go around with guns strapped to their hips will continue to diminish.

buckbova 11y ago

Remove all perceived anonymity. Of course that sense of anonymity is what makes the experience richer and safer. I'd rather just live with the trolls. Is it that bad?

DanBC 11y ago
People are happy to make idiotic comments under their real names linked to their real identity. See the Sikh who advertised Facebook ("What's this raghead terrorist doing on my wall?") or comments under any news article (especially Daily Fucking Mail ("Kill the immigrants")).
- buckbova 11y ago
  They exist and are ultimately in the minority. Anonymous apps tend to bring out the worst in people, especially with groups like teenagers and cyberbullying.
dominotw 11y ago
Nice try NSA. Seems kind of insane that people are willing to dox themselves on the internet.
- dguaraglia 11y ago
  If you read the OP comment carefully, you'll notice he actually is saying the opposite: he'd rather live with the trolls, than have to give up anonymity.
mdip 11y ago
I wish this were a silver bullet, and of course, nothing would completely be a silver bullet, but even in forums/comments that require the use of a "Real Name" (to the extent it can truly be enforced), it's clear that people are OK with trolling under their actual name. The perception of anonymity is important, yes, but the illusion that they're not attacking a "real person" seems to be enough to let people become detached enough to be examples of terrible human beings. And losing anonymity also reduces someone's willingness to talk openly (and civilly) about a topic that they may otherwise be unwilling to discuss (sexuality, medical issues, etc). Heck, I won't even talk directly about my political opinion after reading articles about how people with strong political views are willing to reject a candidate for hiring entirely because of them not aligning politically (not really a problem for me since I generally hate politics). This also lowers the number of available voices and it might reduce the ratio as it relates to trolls. In a sensitive topic do we lose more trolls this way or do we lose more civil conversation? I'm not sure. Elimination of anonymity helps, yes, but isn't appropriate for every kind of discussion and must be combined with other methods.

beeboop 11y ago

If you're so sensitive that your day is ruined or you feel uncomfortable by what a random, anonymous idiot says on the internet, you need to either A. Stay off the internet or B. Only participate in communities where you control who has the ability to post content you see (i.e. facebook). The world doesn't owe you a safe-space hugbox. Trying to censor people for being mean is just as shitty as trying to censor them for saying things you disagree with. I value the rights Americans have to be horrendous shitheads on the internet and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

voidz 11y ago
I know this one! The good answer is: A.
apozem 11y ago
This "toughen up" sentiment sounds nice in theory but it's absurd in practice. Listen to writer Mindy West's story on This American Life about confronting one of her worst trolls [1]. Her troll made a fake Twitter account in the name of her dead father just to mock her. That's grotesque. Not being online or in a community not full of jackasses (what you derisively call a "hugbox") isn't an option for West. She's a writer who has to be on the internet and engaged with social media to do her job. Before you say "Well if you can't handle that, get another job," think about that statement. You're normalizing people being jackasses and blaming their victims for trying to be regular people doing their jobs. You are literally saying, "It's your fault for being on the internet, what did you expect?" West is a good example of how ridiculous this mentality is. We should all be able to participate in online communities without the fear of being stalked or harassed. Frankly, if the mostly white, mostly male tech community was less so, they might actually understand that. This kind of victim-blaming is absurd. I understand a lot of people in tech are fond of free speech principles (and rightly so, they're important) and edgy South Park libertarianism, but this is not the right hill to die on. [1]: http://www.themarysue.com/this-american-life-trolls/ http://www.themarysue.com/this-american-life-trolls/
- theseatoms 11y ago
  What options do well-intentioned people have to fight back? Doxxing the doxxers? Maybe someone will eventually form an online version of the Guardian Angels [1] to combat this issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels

vegancap 11y ago

Ignore them.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

coldcode 11y ago

A beer truck? Seriously everywhere you have free and open communication some people will be trolls. The only difference between today and say 2500 years ago is the speed of dissemination and little fear of being run through with a sword.

mdip 11y ago
The only difference between today and say 2500 years ago is the speed of dissemination and little fear of being run through with a sword. I think, though, that it's a pretty huge difference. The speed with which someone can crap all over a discussion is instantaneous and psychologically a lot easier due to not being "in person". Trolling in the form that it would have existed a couple of centuries ago[1] still exists today (without the sword, perhaps, but the threat of violence in retaliation to trolling still exists today -- we just have better technology and better enforcement). I would use Donald Trump as an example. He gets his share of trolling (and non-trolling protesting) at his in-person events, however, I'd hazard a guess that the amount of such activity during his entire campaign would be about as much as is seen in an hour on Reddit. [1] We don't have a lot of historical evidence that dates back 2500 years, so I'm assuming that was a typo or an embellishment used to make a point (or, perhaps, something I missed in my speed reading of the article).

mdip 11y ago

I've wondered about this for a while. There's no shortage of dicks[1] on the Internet. It's too easy to spout off and attack someone online in a way you'd never do "in person" and there's plenty of people who make a sport of it. For the former, there's not much that can be done, for the latter, I think there are a few solutions (variations of which I've seen tried). Personally, I think it starts first with community standards and moderation. Hacker News, Stack Overflow and such do a pretty good job already. You get a share of jerks here and there but by and large the community self-filters the tone[2] as much as the quality of the comments. When the inevitable trolls appears, one of the best approaches I've seen is to silence them without their knowing it. I wonder how often this practice is figured out and remediated by creating a new account. It'd be possible to extend this further by categorizing troll posts and selectively providing them to each other (as well as providing all replies) so that they think "it's working" and don't bother switching accounts, all the while hiding all of the trash from everyone else. Perhaps that's a lot of wasted energy but I'd be interested in hearing if something like that has been tried anywhere. [1] That word always seems to describe the behavior best, to me. I'll use "jerk" from now on. :) [2] I've always believed that you can say "someone/something is wrong on the internet!" without having to be a jerk about it and have seen many examples of such on Hacker News and the StackExchange family of sites. Those who cannot lack creativity and are, unfortunately, less likely to have their (possibly) valid arguments heard.

ross-life 11y ago
one of the best approaches I've seen is to silence them without their knowing it Shadowbanning does work well but requires (somewhat obviously) fair admins/moderators. Otherwise it becomes something like a censorship tool.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

There is no such thing as a troll. There is such a thing as people being presented with content that's irrelevant to their interests. I better way to semantically express what we need, as well as a recommendation system that goes with it, is what we lack today.

scrupulusalbion 11y ago

I always find it strange how people are seriously concerned with trolling. I understand that children, the emotionally immature, and the psychologically ill are actually harmed by trolling. However, those people are already at risk of being harmed by anything approaching verbal abuse. These are the people who have more important issues to deal with than trolling. These people are irrelevant in this context. The people who matter to trolls are those who can't take a joke, who are super serious all the time; they want to be mad about something. Trolls merely give those people what they want. Flame wars ensue. Purposeful trolls are social pranksters and are conscious of their trolling; these can be reasoned with and are thus not serious issues to fora. The actual trolls worth worrying about are those who troll yet know not their trollish behavior. These people begin arguments over trivialities and get called jerks/dicks/assholes. These people are much harder to reason with, because they will only listen when they are emotionally sober; bringing up their trolling just gets them deep into another argument. You can't stop trolls; they have to grow out of their own emotional immaturity. Thus, as the unconscious trolls are themselves a subset of those harmed by trolling, they can and do harm others without understanding what harm they cause.

arjie 11y ago

The article alludes to it, but there's some pretty neat work at Riot Games around improving player behavior. Here's a pretty good video:http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-.... It's half an hour long but has some fun results. When you have a player base as large as Riot does with League of Legends, some sorts of experiments become possible. Good fun.

CM30 11y ago

Moderation is the best way to stop them. If you've got actual people going through posts and content and removing the low quality stuff, you'll maintain a much more well ordered and useful community than you would a mostly 'uncensored' platform. Unfortunately, this has a few issues... 1. You need the manpower to actually check what's being posted on a regular basis. Or enough active members willing to help out that they'll do it for you on a voluntary basis as moderators. This is obviously easier for small sites like customer support forums and the average fan site. 2, You need to really, really limit bias as much as possible, so that you're booting out people or bots because of their behaviour rather than their political/social stances. This is what Twitter doesn't do at the moment, to the point being a 'progressive' troll is a good way to never get banned while being a conservative or having an unpopular opinion will get your account suspended for the smallest trangression. 3. A willingness to ban popular, rich or 'powerful' users as much as anyone else, if they break the rules. A good forum/community manager will just as easily kick out a troll with ten thousand posts as one with ten, but social media sites don't seem to have figured this out yet. So for a community manager or site owner, moderation is the best way to stop internet trolls (and every other type of troublemaker or nuisance as well). Making a user's post invisible to everyone but himself (shadowbanning or as vBulletin called it, Tachy goes to Coventry) and making their time on the site a nightmare due to fake errors (hell banning/miserable users) used to work. Note the word used to, since the internet is a lot more savvy about this sort of stuff and will usually figure out these systems pretty quickly now. As for how to avoid internet trolls as a user? Well, stay off large social sites with few rules (or in some cases, extremely badly enforced ones) and go to places where the people tend to be a bit nicer to each other due to a shared interest or two. Less Twitter, more forums. Stay fairly anonymous wherever possible. Seriously, trolls love knowing every detail about someone's offline existence and what annoys or upsets them. By giving less personal information, you force people to either REALLY dig for information to use or to attack your arguments rather than your background/appearance/personality. Don't engage in arguments with trolls/idiots. The more you make it seem to affect you, the more pleasure a troll will get from their actions. If you've ever watched The Simpsons, you probably remember the scenes where Bart prank calls Moe's Tavern, right? Or how often, Moe would basically scream back down the phone in anger afterwards? That's what a troll wants to see. They want people who are easy to annoy. So yeah. Moderated community platforms tend to be the best way to stop internet trolls, since they mean such users and comments are removed as quickly as possible.

javajosh 11y ago

Easy: introduce laws that require all communication to be consensual. We don't allow people to force food down your mouth, and we shouldn't allow people to force words into your brain either. What would this be like? Before seeing something, you'd be asked if you want to see "An advertisement for a home care product." Or "An angry personal attack" (Maybe with some indication of who it's against.) This solution allows everyone to say whatever they want, and adds the ability for everyone to not be exposed to what they don't want to be exposed to.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>An advertisement for a home care product. How do you know I want to be exposed to a consent related question? Kinda like how asking certain questions about consent can be classified as harassment if you have already been told no, even if the actions of which consent was being requested for were never carried out.
- javajosh 11y ago
  Sufficient pedantry can make any solution seem unworkable.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

In public we arrest those who break down civil society by smashing windows, beating people up or threating law-abiding citizens. On the internet, we dispute whether anything is actually going wrong. Or how to automatically solve it. At some point I think a wet team is the only solution.

bcook 11y ago
Wet team? (Are you referring to "wet-work", aka murder?)

chris_wot 11y ago

For all the good that Twitter does, it is farceorsecwhat social harm is done. I don't use Twitter and likely never will. It's a cesspool of discrimination and abuse. I hope it dies as a medium.

stegosaurus 11y ago

Journalists seem to make a habit of misunderstanding the term 'troll'. Trolling is a joke. Harassment is not. Joining a dungeon in World of Warcraft and wiping the group is trolling. Sending someone genuine sounding death threats on twitter isn't. There's a spectrum there somewhere, but more often than not it feels like we've lost another useful term to hyperbole.

elthran 11y ago
Always this. The BBC seems especially bad for calling being insulted or offended by something on the internet "Trolling"